by Val McDermid
‘Bugger, bugger, bugger,’ she shouted as the water cascaded over her. She wanted to laze in bed, hugging last night’s encounter with Tony to her heart, replaying his every word. Instead, she was going to be stuck in front of a keyboard all afternoon, hammering out the details of her meetings with Radecki and Krasic.
She was barely out of the shower when the apartment phone rang. It could only be Radecki, she thought. Petra would never call her here, nor would Tony. And nobody else knew where she was. She dashed naked and dripping across the living room and grabbed it on the fifth ring. ‘Hello?’
‘Caroline, how are you today?’ His familiar voice sounded formal.
‘Very well, thanks. And you?’
‘I have to chase off on some urgent business that’s come up. I’m going to be out of town all day.’
‘You sound pissed off with me, Tadzio,’ Carol said, keeping her own tone cool.
‘Not at all.’ His voice softened a little. ‘I’m only sorry because I’d hoped we could get together, maybe talk things over, but it’s just impossible. Please believe me, this is nothing to do with last night. Darko and I really do have to deal with something very important.’
‘That’s fine, Tadzio. Business is important, we both know that. And I’ve got plenty of work to keep me occupied here.’
‘OK, I didn’t want you to think I was being funny with you after what happened last night.’
Carol smiled to herself. She could almost believe she really did have him right where she wanted him. Always leave them wanting more, that was obviously how it was done. ‘I wouldn’t want us to be uncomfortable with each other,’ she said.
‘Good. Oh, and if you want to borrow the Z8, just come round to the apartment. It’s in the underground garage. The attendant has the keys. I’ll tell him you might show up, yes?’
‘Thanks. I don’t think I’ll have the time to go out gallivanting, but it’s nice to know the offer’s there if I need it. Give me a call when you get back, OK?’
‘I will. And when I get back, we’ll sort out our unfinished business, no?’
‘I hope so. Bye, Tadzio.’ She replaced the handset and smiled. It couldn’t have worked out better. With Tadeusz out of the way, she wouldn’t have to find an excuse to buy the time to write her report. And even better, she might be able to spend the evening with Tony. Life was going to be very good from now on. She felt it in her bones.
34
If it carried on raining like this, there wasn’t much prospect of anything moving on the Rhine for a very long time, Tony thought as he peered through the windscreen of the hired Opel into the gloomy afternoon. According to the maps spread out over the passenger seat, he should be approaching a small canal basin up ahead. He’d already covered half a dozen sites around Köln without any luck, and he was growing tired of alternately soaking in the rain and steaming in the car.
He spotted the narrow opening on the right just in time to turn, though he had no opportunity to signal. He was concentrating too hard to notice the VW that swerved hastily into the turning behind him, Rado Matic at the wheel. The lane was almost a tunnel, with high hedges looming on either side, and Rado hung well back. After about a quarter of a mile, it opened out on to a wharf where half a dozen laden Rhineships were moored three deep.
Tony parked the car and climbed out again into the downpour, oblivious to the VW that carried on past his parking spot and disappeared behind a dilapidated building beyond. He scuttled across to the edge of the wharf where he could see the names of the first three boats across their sterns. No Wilhelmina Rosen. He ran down the quayside and checked the other three barges. No luck again. Back at the car, he called Marijke on his mobile. ‘You can cross number seven off the list,’ he said wearily as soon as she picked up the phone.
‘I’m sorry, Tony,’ she said. ‘You’ve been wasting your time.’
‘It had to be done.’
‘No, listen, you have been wasting your time. I got one of my boys to phone the bigger canal basins in the area, the ones where you have to pay fees. And he just came up with a location for the Wilhelmina Rosen.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No, it’s right. The Wilhelmina Rosen is tied up in the Marina Widenfeld. It’s on the Mosel, on the left bank, just outside Koblenz.’
‘Where’s that?’ he asked, shuffling through the large-scale local maps till he found a regional one.
‘Back the way you came from Bonn, down the Rhine to where it joins the Mosel. I think it’s maybe an hour or so, to look at the map here.’
‘Fine,’ he groaned. ‘Just about long enough to dry off before I have to get wet all over again.’
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘You won’t approach him, will you?’
‘No. I’ll just watch. I promise.’ He hung up and started the engine. To his amazement, the rain suddenly stopped as he emerged from the lane on to the main road. Tony smiled. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘If it’s not raining, I can walk past and tell you what a beautiful boat you have. Hang on to your hat, Geronimo, I’m coming.’
Petra glared at Hanna Plesch across her desk. ‘You agreed it would make sense to co-ordinate this with Carol Jordan’s sting in Rotterdam. That’s not going to happen for a couple of days yet. If we put pressure on Radecki and Krasic now, they might call the Dutch trip off, and we could lose the chance to roll up their whole network.’
‘There’s a child’s life at stake here. I’m not prepared to take any chances. We can have Krebs moved out of the prison population tonight. We’ll say she’s been taken to hospital with acute appendicitis. That should give us some leeway in case we get into a hostage situation out at the farm. I want to move in on them as soon as it’s dark.’
Petra was puce with fury. ‘You were the one who was so adamant that we had to give way to Europol and the Brits on this operation. Now you want to grab the glory back.’
Plesch glared at her coldly. ‘I’d have thought that would have appealed to someone as ambitious as you, Petra.’
She felt her hands bunch into fists. ‘I admit I wanted to be the one to close Radecki down. But not at the risk of someone else’s operation. Someone else’s life.’
‘Jordan is at no risk from our operation. However we don’t know if that’s the case where Tanja Krebs is concerned. For all you know, Krasic may have left instructions to dispose of the kid if anything happens to him and Radecki.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Petra raged. ‘If they’re locked up, all the more reason why they need an insurance policy. You’re using anything you can to justify what you want to do.’
Plesch slammed the flat of her hand down on the desk. ‘Enough! You’re forgetting yourself, Becker. I’m in charge of this unit. If you want to stay a part of it, you have to learn where discussion ends and insubordination begins.’
Petra bit down hard on her anger. Giving way to her murderous fury now wouldn’t solve anything. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she forced out.
They glowered at each other across the desk. When Plesch spoke, she had miraculously managed to find a conversational tone again. ‘I take it you want to be part of this operation?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘OK. I’ve got a team coming in from Special Ops to lead the assault on the farmhouse. You’ll be in joint command on the ground. I also want you to go and see Krebs and tell her what’s happening. We need her co-operation, and I think you’re the person to make sure we get it. So, have a briefing with the Special Ops guys, then get yourself over to the jail to talk to Krebs. They’re moving her to the hospital wing in an hour.’
‘Very good, ma’am.’ Petra turned on her heel and walked to the door.
‘Petra?’ Plesch said as she turned the handle.
Petra swung back to face her. ‘Yes?’
‘Trust me, this makes sense.’
The look she gave Plesch said she didn’t believe a word of it. But all Petra said was, ‘If you say so, ma’am.’ Then she was gone.
The S
hark found her five minutes later standing in the pouring rain in the car park, a half-brick in her hand, pounding it into the wall. He had the sense to say nothing but simply wait until, exhausted, she let it fall to the ground. They stood looking at each other, water dripping down their faces. ‘It’s OK, Shark,’ she said.
‘You think so?’
‘We’ll make it so.’ She put her arm round his shoulders and together they walked back inside the police station.
The Mercedes swept imperiously down the outside lane of the autobahn, Krasic at the wheel. ‘Bloody weather,’ he grumbled as the wipers struggled to cope with the spray as they passed an articulated lorry. The countryside was a misty green blur streaked with rain.
‘As my grandmother used to say, if you cannot cure it, you must learn to endure it,’ Tadeusz said, looking up from the shooting magazine he was reading.
‘Fine. But I bet she never had to drive to fucking Köln in the rain because a shipment of heroin was trapped by a Rhine flood,’ Krasic grumbled.
‘Come on, Darko, it’s only a bit of inconvenience. And look at it this way: the police like this weather about as much as we do. It makes it safer for us.’
Krasic grunted noncommittally. ‘I hope it’s better than this when we go up to Rotterdam.’
‘Why don’t we fly up? It’s not as if we’re going to be carrying anything suspicious.’
‘I don’t like flying places unless we have to,’ Krasic said. ‘Names on passenger lists leave a trail, you know that.’
‘Well, what about the train? It’s more comfortable than the car.’
‘It’s too public. You can’t talk on a train. Too many nosy old women going to visit their grandchildren.’
‘God, you really are in a cheerful mood today. What’s eating you?’
Krasic debated whether to say anything about Caroline Jackson and Anthony Hill. Better to wait till he had more information, he decided. It was hard to see how there could be an innocent explanation for what he had witnessed the previous night, but given how besotted his boss was with this mysterious woman, he wanted as much ammunition as he could garner before he said a word against her. ‘I just don’t like the rain,’ he said.
They continued in silence, Tadeusz returning to his magazine. Nearly three hours into the journey, more than two-thirds of the miles covered, Krasic’s phone rang. He reached into his pocket and answered, while Tadeusz tutted at his failure to use the hands-free kit. ‘Hello?’ Krasic said.
‘I’ve done that search,’ the person on the other end said, distorted to a low alto by some sort of electronic voice changer.
‘And?’
‘You need to see the results for yourself. There’s no way I’m talking about this over the phone.’
Krasic didn’t like the sound of this one bit. He knew hackers tended to be fully paid-up members of the paranoid tendency, but that didn’t mean they were always wrong. ‘I can’t come round now. I’m four hundred kilometres from Berlin.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tadeusz looking interested.
‘Can you get yourself to an internet café?’
‘What?’
‘An internet café. A place that rents out computers with internet access.’
‘I know what an internet café is. How does that help me?’
‘I’ll set up an account and send the stuff to you. I’ll use hotmail.com. You type in www.hotmail.com then your account name. I’ll set it up with your own first name and surname. The password is the street where I live. OK? Can you remember that?’
‘Of course I can bloody remember it – www.hotmail.com, then my name and the street where you live. Are you sure this is secure?’
‘It’s a lot more secure than talking on the phone. And, if I were you, I wouldn’t hang about. You need to see this, and fast.’ The caller hung up.
‘Shit,’ Krasic muttered, tossing the phone on to the dashboard. ‘Where the fuck am I going to find an internet café?’
‘What’s going on, Darko?’ Tadeusz asked. ‘Who was that?’
Krasic swore under his breath in Serbo-Croat. ‘Hansi the hacker. He’s been doing something for me that turns out to be urgent. I need to find an internet café.’
‘Well, take the next exit. Every little town and village has internet access these days. What’s it all about?’
Krasic scowled. ‘You’re not going to like this.’
‘I’m not going to like it any better if you make me wait.’
‘After she left you last night, Caroline Jackson met another man.’
Tadeusz looked shocked. ‘You were still following her?’
‘I was still having her followed. You think I’m going to take a stranger on trust? I’ve had someone on her tail since you told me about her. And this is the first time she’s done anything at all except shopping and working out.’
‘So who was this man? Where did she meet him?’ Tadeusz was trying to sound casual, but Krasic could hear the underlying tension in his voice.
‘He has an apartment in the same block where she’s staying. When she got home, she went straight to his apartment. Rado saw them in the window. She was kissing him.’
Tadeusz shook his head. ‘He must have been mistaken. You know Rado. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. They’ll have been greeting each other.’
Krasic shook his head. ‘No. I saw them myself. They were kissing each other like they meant it. And it looked like it wasn’t the first time, either. She was in his apartment for the best part of an hour and a half.’
Tadeusz clenched his fists. ‘But she didn’t spend the night?’
‘No. She wouldn’t be that stupid, would she? Not when you might be calling her on the phone,’ Krasic pointed out brutally. ‘She’s stringing you along, boss.’
‘So what has Hansi the hacker been doing?’
‘When the man went out this morning, I tossed his apartment. Got his name and details. I told Hansi to find out all he could about him. I guess that’s what he’s been doing.’
‘Who is he, this man?’
‘He’s called Dr Anthony Hill. He’s on the staff at St Andrews University, I think. That’s in England, right?’
‘Scotland, actually.’ Tadeusz’s voice was tight and clipped. ‘There’s an exit coming up. Let’s go and find out what Hansi the hacker can tell us about this Dr Anthony Hill. And then we’ll decide what we do about Ms Jackson.’
Krasic glanced at his boss. His profile was grim, the muscles in his jaw bunched tightly. He wouldn’t like to be in Caroline Jackson’s shoes the next time they met. Serves the bitch right, he thought self-righteously as he flicked the turn signal to change lanes. You could never trust a woman.
He’d spent all night tossing in a fever, his berth soaked with sour sweat. His head pounded, waves of blackness pulsing between his temples. All evening, the boat had felt like a trap closing in on him. The forced inactivity was driving him crazy. He had nothing to occupy him except mechanical tasks that did nothing to take his mind off the arguments that raged constantly inside his head. Even Gunther and Manfred had noticed that something was wrong. He’d ended up yelling at them to leave him alone when they’d expressed their concern for the umpteenth time. The look of shock on their faces had been a terrible warning to him about the possible consequences of losing control.
He couldn’t afford mistakes, or everything he had worked for so painstakingly would be lost. He had a long way to go before he could be sure that the world would understand what he was doing, and he needed to remember that every waking minute.
But it was hard to keep a grip on himself when his head was splitting with contradictory messages. Every time he thought he’d got things straight, another insidious notion crept into his mind, throwing things into confusion again. First he’d convinced himself that he’d broken faith with his mission by listening to his grandfather’s voice and fucking Calvet. Then he persuaded himself that he’d done the right thing by making her so completely his. Then the pendulum
would swing again and he’d be as bewildered as before.
On top of this, there had been the shock of reading the news stories that had identified his work. Although he’d known this moment would come, and had thought he was prepared for it, the actuality had thrown him into confusion. They were calling him a monster, which he’d expected. But he’d thought at least one of them would have realized that there was a solid, sensible reason for what had happened to those arrogant bastards. Instead, nobody had had a word of criticism for his victims. They’d been portrayed as innocents, as if it was inconceivable that they might have deserved to die at his hands.
Sure, there had been speculation about possible motives. A couple of the papers had even suggested he might be an insane animal rights activist making a statement against vivisection. Unbelievable. The answer was staring them in the face and they were too stupid to see it.
The more he read, the more angry he had felt. He began to think he would have to spell out to them what was really going on. But he didn’t want to do anything yet that might expose him. He still had work to do, and now it was going to be a lot harder. One of the newspapers had broken the story that the police were warning academic psychologists to report any contact from unfamiliar media personnel. He didn’t know how they’d uncovered his way of making contact, but he was blown now. Every one of the bastards would be on their guard. He wouldn’t be able to use his cover story to lure them into his power again. Not in Germany, at least.
The next one he had planned was due to be in Holland anyway. Those dirty collaborators were as guilty as the German psychologists, he knew that. Maybe he would be safe there one more time, since the single European market still didn’t seem to apply to news. He’d have to be, because he hadn’t thought up an alternative yet, and he couldn’t afford to wait. He needed to blur the memory of Calvet and prove to himself that he wasn’t a failure. He’d just have to be extra careful. But after that, he was going to have to come up with another way to capture his victims.
